Russian, German Young People To Rally Next Spring

High school and university students from Russia, learning German, and from Germany, learning Russian, will meet next May in Moscow and Berlin for a forum, "Together into the 21st century," reports the organising committee of the forum. On the programme are various linguistic, history and literature quizes as well as cultural events. Sergei Krylov, the Russian ambassador to Germany, and Albrecht Konze, the cultural attache of the German embassy in Moscow, have shared the opinion that the forum is designed to promote Russian-German relations and to enable the young people of the two countries to see Russia and Germany as they are. According to the Russian education ministry, German is being learnt by over 3 million schoolchildren and about 200,000 arts students in this country while Germany can speak only about 200,000 students of Russian.